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Arafat agrees to Clinton deal, with conditions

AM Archive - Thursday, 4 January , 2001 00:00:00

Reporter: Agnes Cusack

COMPERE: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is on his way home to the Middle East after talks with US President Bill Clinton. A spokesman for Mr Arafat says he's accepted US plans for peace, with reservations.

But in Israel the announcement is being regarded with suspicion. Prime Minister Ehud Barak says there is no break-through.

Washington correspondent Agnes Cusack asked Dr David Wornser, a Middle East scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, what progress has been made.

DAVID WORNSER: I think there was less made than it appears. There certainly was a conditional yes. But the conditions that we're hearing after Arafat put forward, and there were 25 of them, are generally the same ones that they've been putting forward for a while and caused the negotiations to break down a few days - a few weeks ago.

So while he didn't say no, and he said "yeah I'll accept it in principle", the devil's in the details and the details indicate that there actually still isn't an agreement.

AGNES CUSACK: So a lot of wishful thinking, perhaps, on the part of the Clinton administration.

DAVID WORNSER: Well it's wishful thinking, but it's also an attempt to lock people in.

AGNES CUSACK: How do you think they would manage to do that, if these conditions are in place as you say?

DAVID WORNSER: Well if Barak has said conditionally yes, Arafat has said conditionally yes, then you can turn around and you can try to have some sort of a ceremony or some basis for some public event that creates the appearance of progress in the negotiations.

Then it becomes very hard for each side to walk away from that and they start having to consider things that the other side is demanding, that otherwise right now they wouldn't consider. You create a dynamic this way.

But at the same time it is also designed to try to give the appearance to people on the street, in Israel and in the Palestinian territories, that there is a negotiation going on and I would suppose that the objective behind that is to reduce the tension, which is growing very rapidly right now, toward conflict.

AGNES CUSACK: And as part of the deal Yasser Arafat's talking about 12 days of intensive negotiations with the Israelis in Washington, and Ehud Barak has immediately said "no, I won't be part of that because not enough has happened". So what do you think the Israeli position's going to be in all of this?

DAVID WORNSER: Well he may say no, because - for two reasons. One is that, again, they know that the 25 reservations that Arafat put forward are essentially the same things that caused everything to derail until now. There isn't really that much new.

The second thing is it's becoming increasingly apparent that Ehud Barak is facing an electoral meltdown. He is right now between 20 and 25 per cent behind in the vote against Sharon, and the election's only a month away. So he is in serious trouble, and the polls even now show that most Israelis would not support such a deal, even if it were to come about.

So it wouldn't even help him in the elections now if he got a deal, and that was one of his key electoral hopes, was that a deal would swing the election in his favour, and that's melting in front of him.